I tried GNOME 49 on Manjaro, NixOS, and Chimera, and the RAM usage varied dramatically: Manjaro used 948 MB (90 processes), Chimera used 1.12 GB (107 processes), and NixOS used 757 MB (88 processes). Of course, memory consumption depends on how many background services are running, but if you’re looking for a minimal GNOME installation, NixOS comes out on top.